NAS appliance

As we all store our records more and more electronically it seems to be an issue to store the digital content cost effective…

It seems to be a challenge to find a cost effective end use NAS appliance: the hardware is limited to 2 disks of the embedded OS sucks…

An interesting solution could be the products Lime Technology … They are simple NAS appliances that can be built with of the shelf commodity components.

I do like the MD 1500, which has the possibility to hold 15 disks, the OS is booting from a simple USB stick.

The digital home seems to stir up a lot of excitement in the industry looking at the recent announcements from Apple (Apple TV / Apple Timecapsule), Microsoft (Xbox / MS Home NAS) or Playstation III

Game consoles… of course they are a key to lock in the end-user in a platform. They do hold serious value for the vendors once the customer is sold toward a platform the change that he will move towards the competitor is very small combined with the fact that end users lack the knowledge to achieve this and nobody will provide services due to the that the margins are two low… (Wouldn’t be surprised if Apple would announce a game console...)

Open source has something to offer but as always it seems hard to get a simple and transparent solution… FreeNAS seems to be an exciting distribution… I do like NexentaStor: it is a well coded solution that has everything and offers very good reporting.

If u look at the media appliance then Mythtv, LinuxMCE I don’t think they are technology leaders but they do offer some interesting features. It would be nice to combine NAS features and gaming functionally … one box would then fit all ;-)

Still if u think u can by storage capacity with an uptime from almost 24*7*356 for a few $$ that is really interesting...

OpenSolaris Indiana

For a long time I am looking forward at the Open Solaris Indiana project… after lot of vapourware finally I took up the challenge and installed the OS. I have to admit that the CAIMAN installer looks very neat, there is few things that u have to be aware off…

1. The OS requires a lot of memory…. The more the faster (read more then 512 MB RAM) and a fast hard disk…. I installed that OS on a Dell Inspirion 5000 (1GB memory) and a Toshiba L20 laptop. (512 GB memory) - The Toshiba L20 has not enough power so I switched back to UBUNTU (sigh…) -

2. The installer looks very neat and clean… there are very few parameters u can put probably to few…

3. As mentioned above package management will be key for the success of this distribution and the support for multimedia (e.g. DIVX, etc…) U can use blast wave but still is not the same like Debian of the UBUNTU repositories

What I really like about the OS is the neat command set compared to Linux and very good documentation. This is the most disturbing part of Linux … it seems to be very hard to get some good documentation… and reading forums gives a lot of confusion and contradictions…and stress

I am still wondering if OpenSolaris will truly become a desktop distro… the folks at nexenta give that up and made a nice distro derivative… I am planning to use that in a VM as a database platform. As fileserver I am intending to use NexentaStor … it is available as a VM image or as appliance kernel. NexentaStor is very, I am amazed that it stirs up almost no news…. Sad

Conclusion: if u going to use OpenSolaris gets at least a dual core 64 platform with at least 2-3 GB memory and fast harddisk. Low end laptops don’t give enough speed …If u intend to use the SUN hypervisor then I would be a good idea to use a CPU that support for virtualisation.

Regards

1011

SUN announced a hypervisor for 2008. The hypervisor would be interesting because it will support Windoze… If based on Xen and full virtualisation will be supported then it would be interesting if DiretX will work… (nice for the gamers)